R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 509

Thinking Like Jesus

Here's an excerpt from Thinking Like Jesus, R.C. Sproul's contribution to the October issue of Tabletalk.

Several years ago, I was asked to give a convocation address at a major theological seminary in America. In that address, I spoke about the critical role of logic in biblical interpretation, and I pleaded for seminaries to include courses on logic in their required curricula. In almost any seminary's course of study, students are required to learn something of the original biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. They are taught to look at the historical background of the text, and they learn basic principles of interpretation. These are all important and valuable skills for being good stewards of the Word of God. However, the main reason why errors in biblical interpretation occur is not because the reader lacks a knowledge of Hebrew or of the situation in which the biblical book was written. The number one cause for misunderstanding the Scriptures is making illegitimate inferences from the text. It is my firm belief that these faulty inferences would be less likely if biblical interpreters were more skilled in basic principles of logic.

Continue reading Thinking Like Jesus.

Luther and the Psalms: His Solace and Strength

On 31 October 1517, Luther posted his historic Ninety-five Theses, launching his defiant protest against the vile perversions and grave abuses of the church in Rome. This decisive act became the hinge upon which history turned. And at the very core of this Protestant movement were the Psalms, which continued to play a defining role throughout Luther's life and ministry. While being hidden by supporters in Wartburg Castle, the German Reformer translated the Bible into the German language. Included in this work were the Psalms, which Luther referred to as 'the Bible in miniature'.

In future years, Luther would repeatedly turn to the Psalms for solace and strength. With the continent of Europe in upheaval, he found great comfort in the soul-lifting truths of the Psalms. Specifically, in 1527, Luther faced one of the greatest difficulties of his life as the Black Plague swept across Germany and much of the European continent. During this time, Luther's son almost died and his own body was fainting under the mounting pressure. In the midst of this personal conflict, Luther found himself contemplating the promises of Psalm 46, an encouraging psalm of trust in the invincibility of the Lord.

"...the Bible in miniature." —Martin Luther on the Psalms

Gaining new strength from this old song, Luther composed what is arguably his most famous hymn, 'A Mighty Fortress'. Amid such adversity, this embattled stalwart found God to be his 'bulwark never failing'. Though he had previously taught and even translated the Psalms, Luther now found himself living them as never before. Many times during this dark and tumultuous period, when terribly discouraged, he would turn to his co-worker, Philipp Melanchthon, and say, 'Come, Philipp, let us sing the forty-sixth Psalm.' Together, they would sing:

A sure stronghold our God is He,
A timely shield and weapon;
Our helper He will be and set us free
From every ill can happen.

With unshakable confidence in God, Luther reflected upon and drew strength from this choice psalm:

We sing this psalm to the praise of God, because He is with us and powerfully and miraculously preserves and defends His church and His word against all fanatical spirits, against the gates of hell, against the implacable hatred of the devil, and against all the assaults of the world, the flesh, and sin.

Despite Luther's intense inner turmoil, this valiant Reformer clung to the rock-solid truths of Israel's ancient hymn book. Four years before he died, he wrote in his Bible the text of Psalm 119:92: 'If Your Law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction.' Such biblical truth empowered this spiritual leader and enabled him to persevere in the midst of his many struggles to reform the church. To the very end, this daring leader of the Reformation tenaciously held to the glorious revelations of the Psalms.

This is an excerpt from Steven Lawson's Preaching the Psalms. For a limited time, we're giving readers an opportunity to win one of six copies of this book. See below for details:

See also: Luther and the Psalms: His Thunder.

Copyright 2012 Steven J. Lawson. Preaching the Psalms published by EP Books.

Twitter Highlights (10/14/12)

Here are highlights from our various Twitter accounts over the past week.

Enter here for an opportunity to win one of six copies of Steven Lawson's book, Preaching the Psalms: ligm.in/RH90q2

— Ligonier Ministries (@Ligonier) October 8, 2012

Grab our free podcasts in #iTunes: ligm.in/RYMwithRC and ligm.in/RYMMin

— Ligonier Ministries (@Ligonier) October 9, 2012

A NEW course from @ligonierconnect "Growing in Sanctification." Learn practical guidelines for Christian living. connect.ligonier.org/school/catalog…

— Ligonier Connect (@LigonierConnect) October 10, 2012

That is best for us which is best for our souls (Matthew Henry).

— Ligonier Academy (@LigonierAcademy) October 10, 2012

A true servant of Christ endeavors to follow Christ in thought, word, and work (Whitefield).

— Tabletalk Magazine (@Tabletalk) October 10, 2012

There is no wisdom but that which is founded on the fear of God (Calvin).

— Tabletalk Magazine (@Tabletalk) October 12, 2012

Faith is the fruit of regeneration, not the cause of it. —R.C. Sproul

— Ligonier Ministries (@Ligonier) October 13, 2012

You can also find our various ministries on Facebook:

Ligonier Ministries | Ligonier Academy | Ligonier Connect | RefNet
Reformation Bible College | Reformation Trust | Tabletalk Magazine

Sell All That You Have

Jesus told the rich young fool that he must sell all that he had, give it to the poor, and follow him. Is this true for all who would follow Jesus?

Yes. This, of course, is not what we typically hear about this text. We are told, for instance, that Jesus was tapping into the first use of the law rather than the third here, that rather than telling the young man what he must do to inherit eternal life He was demonstrating that despite the man's claims, he had not in fact kept the ten commandments. Jesus here is saying, "Well, let's look at commandment one. Do you have any gods before me? Money perhaps?" This is all true and good exegesis of the text.

Trouble is that we then go one to comfort ourselves by thinking, "Since I am not like this rich young fool, since I would be willing to sell all that I have and give it to the poor if Jesus asked, I pass this test." We think that he failed an actual test because he was no good, while we pass a hypothetical test because we are good. It is, however, a very different thing to give up all your actual wealth than to merely hypothetically give it all up.

Now it may be that money is not actually an idol in your life. It may be that were Jesus to give you this command you would get right to work selling off assets. All of us, however, have idols, things we hold back from giving to the Lord. I discovered an idol in my own life several years ago when God in His providence didn't ask me to give it away, but simply took it from me. I had at that time something of a reputation as a rather bold and prophetic fellow, someone who bravely didn't much give a thought to his reputation. That reputation quickly morphed into a reputation as a bully and a cheat. And I learned rather quickly that I did indeed give a thought to my reputation, that I craved, longed for a reputation as one who didn't care about his reputation. My deceitful heart had deceived me again.

When we sign on with Jesus we give up our wealth. We give up our reputations. We give up every gift that He had already given us, and every gift He will give us from that moment forward. When we become a part of the bride of Christ our pre-nuptial agreement reads, "All that I am and all that I have is yours O Lord, from this day forth and evermore." When, therefore, He asks for anything, whether our wealth, our reputation, even our spouse or our child, we confess, "Yes, Lord." The rich fool went away from Jesus sad for he had great wealth. We, however, walk toward Jesus, joyful, for we already had nothing. My Denise, and my Shannon, these are the golden crowns that I joyfully cast before His glassy sea. For they were always His, and because I am His always.

Do you have to give up your wealth? Of course. Even if the Master allows you to continue to steward it for Him. Do you have to give up your reputation? Of course, even if He allows you live in peace and quietness with all men. Will you have to give up your loved ones? Of course, even if they are with you until your home going. You have to give up everything, just like He did. And, like Him all you will receive in return, is everything.

Continually Washed by the Gospel

The Lord said to Moses, "You shall also make a basin of bronze, with its stand of bronze, for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it, with which Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet. When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister, to burn a food offering to the Lord, they shall wash with water, so that they may not die. They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die. It shall be a statute forever to them, even to him and to his offspring throughout their generations." (Exodus 30:17-21)

Right after you were born, the blood and vernix on your body was washed off by a nurse or even your mom or dad. Have you taken a bath or shower since the day you were born? Of course you have. Our bodies continually become dirtied, requiring new cleansing. It is the same way with us spiritually. Even after we are born again by the Spirit of God (John 3:1–8), we continue to sin. We have to be washed for the first time by Jesus, but He also continues to wash us of our sins.

The bronze basin filled with water was not placed in the midst of the tabernacle courtyard for a once-for-all initial washing, after which it became a useless relic. It had to be used continually. God required the priests to wash "when they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister" (Ex. 30:20). How many times was that? It was as many times as they entered the tent, offered a sacrifice, or lifted up a prayer. They had to wash every time with no exceptions, which means they had to do so every day.

This is a great lesson for us today. We live in a time when the gospel of salvation has been divorced from the ordinary and everyday Christian life. With modern methods of crusade evangelism and seeker-sensitive worship services in which the focus is on unbelievers, most Christians today think that the "gospel" is something that we tell unbelievers so that they might be saved. We had to hear it long ago to be saved, and unbelievers now need to hear it to be saved. But we learn something different from this part of Exodus 30. We learn that God's people, who are described in both the Old and New Testaments as "a kingdom of priests" (Ex. 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9), must constantly hear the good news of the gospel and constantly apply its cleansing to their hearts.

God's people...must constantly hear the good news of the gospel and constantly apply its cleansing to their hearts.

Just as the priests had to be washed again and again, we need to be washed continually by the good news that Jesus' blood and Spirit have cleansed and continue to cleanse us of our sins. The Apostle John told ancient Christians: "My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 2:1–2a).

An Excerpt from God in Our Midst by Daniel Hyde. Available now from ReformationTrust.com

$5 Friday: Apologetics, Prayer, & Grace

It's time for our weekly $5 Friday sale. This week's resources cover such topics as preaching, the gospel, Islam, forgiveness, prayer, providence, apologetics, and more. We thank Christian Focus Publications and Crossway Books for their partnership this week.

Sale runs through 12:01 a.m. — 11:59 p.m. Friday EST.

View today's $5 Friday sale items.

An Unprecedented Offer: Get a 60-Part Overview of Systematic Theology

Something I have often heard in my long career as a theologian and teacher is "What really matters is what's in your heart." I've not just heard that from the world, I think I hear it from professing evangelicals more often than anyone else.

This phrase concerns me—not because it is wholly false. People who say it usually mean that God prizes deeply rooted conviction and affection within the person. And clearly this is a key biblical truth (1 Sam. 16:7; Luke 12:34; Rom. 2:29).

Yet Jesus tells us to love God with heart and mind (Matt. 22:37). We can't love anyone we don't know—even our great God. Burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads.

We can have heads full of knowledge that never penetrates our hearts, but our hearts can't fully adore the Lord unless we love Him with our minds. If we don't train our minds on His revelation, plumbing its depths to see how it fits together and informs all of life, our Christian growth will be stunted and sacrificial discipleship will be impossible.

We have been proclaiming this message through Ligonier for more than forty years through conferences, Reformation Bible College, Tabletalk, Reformation Trust, Renewing Your Mind radio broadcast, internet-based outreach, and teaching series. One key series is Foundations, which I designed specifically to help people learn the full scope of historic Christian teaching.

The sixty 23-minute lectures of Foundations cover every major Christian doctrine, including God's attributes, the person of Christ, the Trinity, mankind as God's image, sin, atonement, the Holy Spirit, Christ's return, and more. It lays the groundwork—a foundation—so that you can renew your mind to know and love better our holy Lord.

Burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads. —R.C. Sproul

This November, we want to air key parts of Foundations on Renewing Your Mind to help listeners worldwide understand the Christian faith. A gift of any amount will support the broadcast of these lectures and sustain our ministry at this critical time.

To thank you for your donation, we will send you the complete Foundations series on DVD and a CD with the series in MP3 format and a study guide. You will get all sixty lectures to use for your own learning, a group Bible study, or other purposes. We are making this unprecedented offer of one of our key teaching series because there is an urgent need today for Christians to be fully grounded in theology. You can donate via our secure website.

We must love God with heart and mind to experience the fullness of Christian discipleship. Your support will help us encourage the church in this truth and provide tools to help believers grow more deeply in Christ. Thank you.

This resource offer expires November 30th, 2012.

A Hopeful Offense

Here's an excerpt from A Hopeful Offense, John Starke's contribution to the October issue of Tabletalk.

In my neighborhood, there are almost thirty Jewish synagogues. These congregations include Reformed, Orthodox, and Hasidic Judaism. And, of course, our city is full of secular Jews who have long left any traditional form of their faith. So, on any given Sunday, there is a possibility of having a small handful of folks who identify themselves with any of the above Jewish traditions present in our church service.

Just as having divorced individuals present will affect the way you preach a sermon on marriage, having Jews in your service will affect the way you preach the gospel. In fact, it's likely to make it more biblical.

Continue reading A Hopeful Offense.

In the Beginning God

When Genesis speaks of a beginning, it is referring to the advent of the universe in time and space. It is not positing a beginning to God but a beginning to the creative work of God. One of the most enigmatic questions of philosophy and theology relates to the nature of time. Was the universe created in time, or was it created along with time? Did time exist before creation, or did it come into being with creation? Most classical theologians affirm that time correlates with creation. That is, before matter was created, time, at least as we know it, did not exist. How one approaches this question of the origin of time is usually bound up with how one understands the nature of time. Some see time not as an objective reality but merely as a category or construction of the mind.

However we conceive of time, we can agree that the ordinary manner by which we measure time requires a relationship between matter and motion. A simple clock uses hands that move around the face of a dial. We measure time by the motion of these hands. Or we may use an hourglass, which measures time by the passing of sand through a narrow aperture in the glass. The sundial measures time by the movement of a shadow. There are many devices to measure time, but in the final analysis they all rely on some sort of motion relative to some type of matter.

If there is no matter, we cannot measure motion. If we cannot measure motion, we cannot measure time. However, just because we cannot measure time without matter does not mean that without matter time does not exist. Genesis merely asserts that the universe had a beginning. It does not explicitly declare that time began with the universe. That concept is derived via speculative philosophy. The philosophical concerns are usually linked to our broader understanding of the nature of God. Especially when we declare with Scripture that God is eternal, the question of His relationship to time arises. Does His eternality mean that He is somehow outside of time, that He is timeless? Or does His eternality mean that He exists in an endless dimension of time?

If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing. —R.C. Sproul

However we answer this question, we conclude that God Himself never had a beginning. He exists infinitely with respect to space and eternally with respect to time. His existence has neither a starting point nor an ending point. The dimensions of His existence are from everlasting to everlasting. This means that He always has been and always will be.

In the Beginning God

Because God Himself had no beginning, He was already there in the beginning. He antedates the created order. When we affirm that God is eternal, we are also saying that He possesses the attribute of aseity, or self-existence. This means that God eternally has existed of Himself and in Himself. He is not a contingent being. He did not derive from some other source. He is not dependent on any power outside Himself in order to exist. He has no father or mother. He is not an effect of some antecedent cause. In a word, He is not a creature. No creature has the power of being in and of itself. All creatures are contingent, derived, and dependent. This is the essence of their creatureliness.

In the Beginning God Created

Thinkers hostile to theism have sought every means imaginable to provide a rational alternative to the notion of an eternal, self-existent deity. Some have argued for an eternal universe, though with great difficulty. Usually the temporal beginning of the universe is granted, but with a reluctance to assign its cause to an eternal, self-existent being. The usual alternative is some sort of self-creation, which, in whatever form it takes, falls into irrationality and absurdity. To assert the self-creation of anything is to leap into the abyss of the absurd because for something to create itself, it would have had to exist before it existed to do the job. It would have had to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. Some speak of self-creation in terms of spontaneous generation, which is just another name for self-creation. This would involve the logically impossible event of something coming from nothing. If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing. Even that statement is problematic because there can never be nothing; if nothing ever was, then it would be something and not nothing.

Excerpt from God's Love by R.C. Sproul. Available now from the Ligonier Store.

Copyright 2012 R.C. Sproul. God's Love published by David C Cook. Publisher permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

Is it a Sin to Vote for a Mormon or Roman Catholic?

In this excerpt from a Questions & Answers session at our 2012 National Conference, Albert Mohler, Robert Godfrey, and Sinclair Ferguson discuss the question, "Is it a sin for a Christian to vote for a Mormon or a Roman Catholic for President of the United States?"

Transcript

R.C. Sproul: Is it a sin for a Christian to vote for a Mormon or a Roman Catholic for President of the United States?

(...)

Albert Mohler: Absolutely not. It's not a sin to vote for someone of whom... In other words, if the only person we can vote for is an evangelical Christian then we're in big trouble. We're electing a President as a Constitutional officer, not a pastor. At the same time we have to recognize, we're the people that know that worldview matters. The reality is we know that we're a composite; that our world view comes out of our most cherished and basic beliefs. And so everything is fair game for interrogation by voters.

But quite frankly, in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was running for the President of the United States, when there was a great deal of anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States, he went and spoke to the Houston Baptist Pastors Association and said that, "my faith should be a matter of interest only to me." And he said it should have no public significance whatsoever. Well that's nonsense. The reality is, I wish John F. Kennedy had been far more Catholic than he was. Because the worldview on the issues we're talking about... these are issues in which we should be able to draw a line from someone's worldview to their policy positions. And they are composite human beings. We shouldn't say you can't vote for an X or a Y because quite frankly we've been humiliated by some who had identified themselves as Evangelical Christians and then held public office and not make the connections between our worldview and the policy positions that should flow from that. We need to look at a person, look at them compositely, understand that we are electing a secular office, to hold a Constitutional function, and then we should do our very best to encourage the people who have the most comprehensively healthy worldviews to run for office and to do so with integrity. And at the end of the day, let's be very thankful that we follow the Lord who said, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." And there's a difference between the church and the government. And, it's at difficult moments like this we have some hard things to think through, but at the end of the day, this is where Christians better be thinking as Christians when we go into the voting booth.

Robert Godfrey: But I do think—I agree with what you said—but I do think just as it was right for people to raise the question with John Kennedy, "Will he be able to conduct the Constitutional office independent of the papacy?," some reporter ought to ask Mitt Romney, "What is his relationship with the prophet in Salt Lake City?" And he ought to be on the record as to what his position is...

Mohler: That's right, I agree. That's why we need more talk about this and not less.

Godfrey: Right. And what becomes appalling is how little the press knows about religion, and therefore never knows the right question to ask about religion. ...But, I certainly agree with what you're saying.

Sproul: Good, thanks. Next question...

(...)